Tugende, a motorcycle taxi financing company headquartered in Uganda has defaulted on a $5 million loan from Goldfinch Protocol, a global credit marketplace offering attractive yields to investors in Real World Assets (RWA).
According to GoldFinch, the default can be traced to Tugende Kenya lending $1.9 million of the borrowed funds to its counterpart, Tugende Uganda. This was in breach of the loan agreement and was done without the knowledge of the Goldfinch community.
“The Goldfinch protocol will correspondingly write down the senior pool for the amount of the Tugende loan, while simultaneously pursuing all options available to maximize the return from this loan over time. This is the first loan restructuring of this kind on the Goldfinch platform,” Goldfinch said in a letter to its community.
The Ugandan subsidiary is said to be facing financial issues that led to the inter-company loan which now leaves Goldfinch exposed to the situation.
“Due in large part to macroeconomic factors (specifically inflation and rising energy costs) and certain managerial missteps (mainly an aggressive headcount increase in 2022), over the last 12 months, Tugende Uganda has performed poorly, and its balance sheet has deteriorated.”
As a result Tugende Kenya has not had the capital it needs to grow its loan portfolio and create the profits needed to repay the loan. This has led to a decrease in its portfolio size and a decline in its portfolio quality over the past nine months, Goldfinch said.
Proceeds from Tugende’s $5 million loan taken in October 2021 (set to mature in October 2023) would be used to fund the growth of Tugende’s operations in Kenya by providing asset financing to motorcycle taxi operators in the region.
According to Goldfinch, on its platform, investors evaluate individual deals and supply USDC directly to attractive borrowers across a global reach of high-return markets previously only accessible to institutional insiders.
Moreover, the platform offers a Senior Pool where investors ‘deposit in the Senior Pool to automatically diversify your investment across all Goldfinch Borrower Pools, based on the protocol’s novel ‘trust through consensus’ community vetting mechanism.’
Investors were alerted that the entire loan could potentially be deemed unrecoverable as a result of the restructuring.
According to Goldfinch, if a total loss were to occur, it could lead to a significant reduction in the senior pool’s annual percentage yield (APY), decreasing it from the current 7.4% over the previous 12 months to as low as 1.5%.
Moreover the net asset value (NAV) of its Senior Pool will experience a reduction of 3.95% over the course of the next four months due to the incident.
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